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Rating: Many do not know that Florence Foster Jenkins was a guest on the show La Corrida, where she performed with her masterpiece, the aria "The Queen of the Night" from Mozart's Magic Flute.
At the green light, there was a triumph of cowbells, whistles, and noise, with the effect of barking dogs, Maestro Pregadio's amused face, and Corrado cynically giving words of encouragement but secretly laughing more than anyone.
Perhaps my mind, in the scent of senility, is overlapping two different realities, creating a mash-up of situations. Jenkins never participated in any television show. She was an eccentric patron funder encouraging musicians orbiting the East Coast music scene.
The person mocked on TV was John Cage, seeking money to produce his works.
And it's a shame these two personalities never met: they would have helped each other. Cage needed the whistles and clamor directed at his compositions not only for money but also to complete his musical and philosophical experiments.
Jenkins knew the whistles at the prestigious Carnegie Hall in front of an audience that didn't even wait for the green light to cover her with howls and insults. She wanted to help young people involved in the war, giving them two hours of music and art. This woman had a heart. A heart worth understanding. But this time, without any shelter, without any selected audience, no guided review, the truth inevitably shook her, leading to her death.
It was that day that Florence realized more than ever that she had created a monster that answered her own name. In the years she economically encouraged Toscanini and attended concerts of technically skilled nightingales, part of her brain also told her: "Miss Jenkins, you sing horribly. You, Miss Jenkins, are off-key, ridiculous, pathetic."
The deity of bel canto, the god doremifasolasidò, was speaking.
Damned camerata de' Bardi and damned Galileo's father, so obsessed with the theories of Aristoxenus of Taranto, the myth of the Hellenic antiquity and this desire to bring out speech singing and the gene of equally temperament. They were doing so well with pungent and virtuosic madrigals, sacredness and transcendence, drones and profane brilliance, lute of the people and exciting thirds.
And America to the natives.
In that new America, instead, a step away from power yet still so rough in cultural experiences, Lou Harrison began jotting down the Symphony for Percussion, also inspired by Charles Ives, a guy who in the early 1900s began to realize that tonality had already said everything. And John Cage, in the years when Jenkins was raising funds for virtuous logos, started composing his first works, so environmental, so Satie, in that indissoluble Paris – New York link that changed the artistic rules of last century.
If Florence Foster Jenkins had seen farther, she would have dismissed Toscanini and embraced the new cause of avant-garde stars and stripes, then yes, she would have become a positive icon. She would have never known the humiliation of merciless articles always hidden from her and could have economically supported brave artists who might have seen something new and welcomed in her off-key and annoying singing.
Her ungracious singing would have become atonal, experimental, deliberate and bloody new: a Cathy Berberian all to understand. And someone would have believed it too. And ultimately, she also had her own aesthetic: to accompany her on the piano, she chose Cosmè McMoon, the musician with the most sensitive touch, the same touch Cage had when he wrote Imaginary Landscape No 1.
McMoon, paid handsomely, was the chosen pianist who accompanied her during those concerts but also in her first recordings and in that human zoo of the Carnegie Hall. Upon Jenkins's death, burned out and mocked by beauty lovers and those embracing the advancing new, he left everything to dedicate himself to bodybuilding.
"People may say I can't sing, but no one can ever say I didn't sing."
It's the symbolic phrase of the sensational biography of this eccentric high-society woman, the obsessive result of a not-so-simple relationship with a father who disinherited her for deciding to dedicate her life to music. The pride of triumphing over paternal dogma managed to sweeten and distort the evidence until it rendered it unreal. Yet her publications were a success in the record industry. An inexplicable success, if not for a cynical interpretation, born from that great desire to have a good laugh between wars.
Few were interested in her emotional aspect, few, at the time, managed to find valid literature capable of portraying her beyond the humorous and grotesque effect. The album contains her most famous interpretations: From The Enchanted Tabacchiera by Lyadov, to Like a Bird and Serenata Mexicana, composed by McMoon himself, the Bell Song from Delibes's Lakmé. Strauss's Die Fledermaus (my favorite).
Jerkins has three heirs. Three homely girls forced by their father to perform in public despite being a trio of utter incompetents. The Shaggs, also victims of that fatal father-daughter match, also unable to rationalize reality. They too became icons of a world of losers.
I would like the afterlife to really exist, just to give Florence the joy of seeing herself played by an extraordinary Meryl Streep (the film should be released in Italy in December).
But I also like to imagine another truth: Jenkins was trolling opera arias because she found them discursive and predictable, far from the new. When Feldman and Cage left a concert after hearing Webern because "it was pointless to listen to the rest," I like to think she also left but stumbled over one of her picturesque dresses and never met those two.
I like to imagine her subversive, saturated with an already said beauty, wanting to destabilize an eager environment incapable of telling her face-to-face that she sang horribly.
But maybe, unfortunately, it didn't go like that.
She was just a tone-deaf mind with a soul that had a delightful touch.
Tracklist
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